North Korea's sudden turn may jeopardize planned summit (Editorial)

Updated May 16, 2018 at 2:46 PM;Posted May 16, 2018 at 10:35 AM

South Korean protesters stage a rally against the Max Thunder joint military exercise between the United States South Korea near the U.S. embassy in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, May 16, 2018. North Korea on Wednesday canceled a high-level meeting with South Korea and threatened to scrap a historic summit next month between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un over military exercises between Seoul and Washington that Pyongyang has long claimed are invasion rehearsals. A senior North Korean diplomat said Pyongyang will refuse to be pressured into abandoning its nukes. The signs read: " We oppose the Max Thunder joint military exercise". (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Sadly, it's beginning to appear that way. Though it shouldn't come as a great surprise, it surely is a real disappointment.

On Tuesday, with less than a month until the planned summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un, the repressive and isolated state got all amped up about Joint military exercises being carried out by the United States and South Korea. It canceled a planned meeting with South Korean officials, and said next month's summit in Singapore could be in peril.

But that was only the beginning.

Just hours later, official pronouncements from North Korea took on something of the state's hyperbolic tone of old.

Using the initials for North Korea, DPRK, a prepared statement from the world's most isolated nation concluded as follows:

"If the Trump administration takes an approach to the DPRK-U.S. summit with sincerity for improved DPRK-U.S. relations, it will receive a deserved response from us. However, if the U.S. is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in such dialogue and cannot but reconsider our proceeding to the DPRK-U.S. summit."

As Ronald Reagan might have said: There they go again.

If North Korea is going to start playing a game of bait-and-switch, seeming to offer one thing but then quickly changing course and proffering another, obviously inferior product, the United States must be fully prepared to walk away from the planned summit. Would it be disappointing? Absolutely. But our negotiators cannot shuffle into a meeting with Kim and his team, hat in hand, in a position of weakness.

From the sudden, stunning announcement of a possible Trump-Kim meeting to its recent scheduling, the old realities seemed to have been turned upside-down. Trump, who'd derided Kim as "Little Rocket Man," began to praise him. North Korea released three Americans who'd been imprisoned.

The stage seemed set for something dramatic, and completely unexpected.

Until Tuesday, that is.

North Korea's official statement came just four weeks before the scheduled Trump-Kim summit. Though the State Department said it will continue to plan as though the meeting will occur, there's the very real possibility that, at a minimum, there'll be additional starts and stops, further unanticipated twists and bumps in the road ahead.

Back when Reagan was president and was working on arms-reductions agreements with the Soviet Union, he'd frequently restate his guiding principle: Trust, but verify.

Perhaps the Gipper's saying got mixed up and jumbled in translation to the North Koreans, who are suddenly behaving as though their basic notion is more long these lines: